How Costa prompts feedback

Having a post-gym breakfast at my local Costa last week, I saw a poster asking for customer feedback which went beyond the ordinary.

One difficulty, when asking for any kind of feedback, is to prompt people to think without pre-disposing them in any particular direction. Another is to get them to give positive feedback, instead of only giving feedback when they've a complaint to make! What Costa have done - as part of the poster design, not the overt message - is to provide a set of stems, so that they tacitly suggest ways you might start your feedback while leaving the actual feedback up to you.

The stems include: "We found ...", "We were ...", "I wish ...", "Glad to see ...", "Thank you for ...", "Hope it ...", "I really felt ...", "Could you ...", "Really enjoyed ...".

This reminded me of Andrew Ravenscroft's Academic Talk / InterLoc project, which experimented with an online discussion interface which forced students to contribute to the discussion using one of a limited set of stems. (For example: “I think that…”, “I disagree because…”, “Is there any evidence that…”, “Why do you think that…”.) Interestingly, students found the constraint of their responses didn't inhibit them but actually enabled them to engage in more and deeper discussion.

I like Costa, so I hope the poster works just as well for them. My own feedback: great graphic design, and a model of customer engagement!

Reference
Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Eileen Scanlon, “Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20 (2004), pp 194-204.

Share and enjoy

The draft text for some course materials I was producing included a section called "Share and enjoy". In a meeting for last minute editorial revisions, one of my colleagues proposed that the section heading should be changed because "Share and enjoy" was naff. I observed that a stronger reason for changing it was its use in Douglas Adams' 'Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. The blank faces around me suggested that this media reference wasn't as well-known as I'd thought, so it's worth exposition here.

It comes from the second series - Fit the Ninth, to be precise - which wasn't represented in the TV series or the film, which is probably why it's not as familiar as, for example, Vogon poetry, or Life, the Universe and Everything.

NARRATOR: 'Share and Enjoy' is, of course, the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to show a consistent profit in recent years.

The motto stands - or stood - in three mile high illuminated letters near the complaints department spaceport on Eadrax - 'Share and Enjoy'.

Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the underground offices of many talented young complaints executives - now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read 'Go stick your head in a pig' and are no longer illuminated except at times of special celebration.

Once again, I'm astounded at the prescience of Douglas Adams. At a time when most commentators were forecasting either techno-utopia or techno-dystopia, he foresaw technology being used in the service of corporate blah, of marketing and PR. This is a universe in which the lifts not only welcome you but refer you to other buildings containing lifts produced by the same manufacturer, where the shoe companies use techno-military hardware to enforce sales of their unsatisfactory footware, and where the drinks machines threateningly command you, as they dispense their disgusting liquids, to "enjoy your drink". Yes, he saw the future all right.

Reference
Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1985), pp 176-77.

Investigation is the game

Realistic scenarios are a powerful way of teaching practice-based subjects, such as education, health care, social care, and business management. The difficulty with embodying them in teaching materials is how to provide feedback to the learner. You want them to make their own interpretations of rich and complex practice information and possibly come up with reasoned conclusions about possible courses of action; but how do you make sure that their thinking is along the right lines?

The simplest way of enabling learners to check their own thinking is a multiple-choice quiz, where you get learners to make a decision, selecting from a list of options, and then give them some kind of feedback on their answer. The problem with the multiple-choice format is that you have to include the right or optimal answer in the option list. Doesn't this make things too easy for the learner, by removing the need for them to think up the answer for themselves?

I've already commented on a multiple-choice scenario on OpenLearn, based on Richard Feynman's investigation of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. In this scenario, none of the choices are absolutely wrong and none are indisputably right; the learning comes from the carefully-written feedback which discusses the pros and cons of each. But sometimes there are particular answers you want learners to give, or particular things you want to make sure they've grasped before they move on. How do you test learners' understanding and interpretive powers in such a scenario?

I've recently played two adventure games which deal with this problem directly. Both are detective stories, so just as in a professional practice scenario your basic activities are those of gathering information, making inferences, coming to conclusions and justifying them by evidence.

The first game is Detective Grimoire, which despite its cartoon graphics and comedy setting actually supports some quite sophisticated reasoning. At various points in the investigation, you need to advance the story by following through the Detective's train of thought. For example, near the start of the game, just after meeting a mysterious little girl, he reflects that Boggy's Bog, the tourist attraction where the murder took place, seems to be in the middle of nowhere: to reach it, his sidekick Officer James has had to take him on a long boat journey through a swamp. Where does this thought lead? To answer, you need to drag-and-drop four multiple-choice elements to form a sentence.

Slot 1 options: That little girl / Boggy’s Bog the tourist attraction / The murder / The swamp / Officer James / My beard / My hat / Our boat

Slot 2 options: is too stupid for / is far too remote for / isn't warm enough for / is way too big for

Slot 3 options: (as Slot 1)

Slot 4 options: to have happened / to make any money / to be so smart / to murder someone

In keeping with the cartoon setting, most of the possible combinations are ridiculous (for example: "My beard it too stupid for the murder to have happened", and Detective Grimoire will tell you so if you select them. If you select the right combination ("The swamp is far too remote for Boggy's Bog the tourist attraction to make any money"), the story can move on. You could find the right combination by trial and error, but the number of possible combinations is so large you'd do better to try to work it out. (If you get three out of four of the options right, Detective Grimoire gives you an encouraging response.)

The second game is Cognition, which has a very different feel. You play Erica Reed, an FBI agent with psychic powers, who in the first episode is investigating a hanging murder which leads to the trail of a serial killer. Near the beginning, Erica investigates the crime scene, using her special powers as well as talking to the other specialists, before being summoned by her boss Davies to give a report. After each of Davies's questions, you get a series of options for Erica's reply. There's nothing difficult about giving the right answers; the purpose of this interaction within the game is to make sure that you've understood the situation before you're allowed to move on.

Davies: Now what have you found? How did the victim die? 

(1) Broken neck;
(2) Shot in the head;
(3) Suffocation.(Correct answer: 3.)

Davies: Who is our John Doe?

(1) Can’t identify, victim fingerprints have been skinned;
(2) Cannot identify, no fingerprints in the database;
(3) Al Williams.
(Correct answer: 2.)

Davies: Any leads on the killer?

(1) Terence has a lead based on DNA;
(2) The killer was smaller than the victim, the killer struggled with the hanging of the victim;
(3) There were fingerprints all over the place, we’ll be able to identify the killer soon.
(Correct answer: 2.)

In this first test, at the start of the game, there's no penalty for giving incorrect answers - except that Davies will giving Erica a telling off ("Just from standing here, I can see what a load of crap you told me!"). Towards the end of the game, however, there's another test in which correct answers are required. At this stage, Erica has assembled all the information she needs to crack the case. A photograph found at the crime scene leads her to re-open a previous case, the hanging of a women named Sarah Goodman, which was judged a suicide at the time, despite the protestations of her husband Robert who maintained that she was murdered. When she tracks him down, Robert recognises the new hanging victim, and with some help from Erica's psychic powers is able to recall his name: Antony Longmire, a worker on the Boston public transport system. Searching Longmire's apartment with her colleague Sully, Erica discovers a safe containing a collection of documents and photographs on a number of women: apart from Sarah, there are two others in Boston, three in New York, and three in Tennessee, all except one having died from hanging, with all but one case being judged to be suicide. By talking to Sully, Erica now has the opportunity to state her conclusion, and Sully will press her for details. If Erica gives a wrong answer at any point, Sully will say that he doesn't buy her explanation, and you have to start from the beginning again.

(1) Why did the killer change his pattern and kill a man?
(2) Sully, Antony Longmore was a killer!
(3) Sully, it’s Robert!

Erica: Sully, Antony Longmire was a killer!

Sully: You think? What’s our evidence?

(1) He worked at the train station;
(2) He was a lonely man;
(3) Those women from the safe are his victims.

Erica: Those women from the safe are his victims. He took those photographs, and he’s been doing it for years until someone stopped him last night. He was in Tennessee first, and then in New York. He killed these women, and he had a pattern.


(1) He kills in groups of two;
(2) He kills in groups of three;
(3) He kills in groups of four.

Erica: He kills in groups of three.

Sully: How do you know?

Erica: Two reasons.

(1) He was staying here;
(2) He was moving out soon.

Erica: He was moving out soon. And...

(1) He’s killed three victims in every state;
(2) He killed three victims in every state except New York.

Erica: He’s killed three victims in every state except for New York. Look at the boxes, You mentioned the landlord said he was moving out. He was done here, ready to go on to the next city. He killed in threes all the time.

Sully: But what happen in New York? Why is Nadia Schwartz still alive?

(1) Because of Emelie Karlsson;
(2) Nadia Schwartz was his accomplice;
(3) He was fired from the Transit Department.

Erica: Because of Emelie Karlsson’s case. They almost caught him. He fled New York before his work was done there, and he could never get to Nadia Schwartz. It’s clear even in the way he met his victims.

Sully: How?

(1) He was a photographer;
(2) He cleaned their lawns;
(3) He met them through public transportation.

Erica: He met them through public transportation. He worked there. That’s where he targeted his victims.

Sully: Yeah, yeah. You’re right! But if this piece of shit was done last night, killed in the same way he killed his victims, who killed him?

While each question on its own could easily be answered by guesswork or eliminating the distractor options, the requirement to get all the answers right in sequence poses a significant challenge. Even if players only discover the correct answers from seeing them in the list of options, rather than working them out for themselves, still the question-and-answer format forces them to work through the detail of the story. In this way, the designers ensure that players understand what's going on before they proceed to the game's shocking denouement. Like the multiple choice sentence building in Detective Grimoire, this is a question-and answer structure which can easily be implemented in an online scenario, as a way of enabling learners to test their thinking and encouraging them into active learning rather than just reading their way through the materials.

The cameraphone generation

Our grand-daughter, aged six and a half, has decided that museums are A Good Thing, and so we took her to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge over the Easter holiday. She had a great time (we could hardly drag her out of the Armoury), but what really struck me was that whatever took her fancy she photographed on her cameraphone.

At first I was alarmed at the rapid and apparently indiscriminate way she took her pictures: "oh, that's nice,`' click; "that's nice," click; click. And then I realised that for the cameraphone generation this is one of the ways in which you experience and process the world, marking those things of interest by taking a photo of them.

It wasn't the only way she experienced the museum objects; we talked about the ones on which she seemed to focus ("which parts of the horse is its armour protecting?), and having obtained some paper and crayons from the Visitors desk she drew about a dozen of her favourite exhibits as we went around. We also hunted for all the cool objects illustrated on the kid's map of the museum: the box of gold coins, the slightly scary painting of a winged skeleton, the giant ceramic owl, the Egyptian sarcophagus, and the figurine of an angry Harlequin (which she spotted before we did). But at the end of a long day she was still snapping with almost as much intensity as when she started.

I'm not worried about whether her pictures are any good, or even whether she keeps a single one of them. I'm happy to accept the cameraphone as one of the tools with which a child these days encounters and tries to make sense of the world. I'm also deeply grateful to the Fitzwilliam for having lifted their ban on photography; clearly our grand-daughter was not their first visitor to experience the Museum through a cameraphone!

Seen and heard: April 2014

Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Angela Hewitt - on four CDs. I'd been meaning to get a recording of this, and I'm so glad that I chose this one, because it's tremendous and great for driving to (much better than rock anthems). More seriously, Hewitt is looking like becoming this generation's definitive interpreter of Bach on the piano; I'm sorry I missed her recent talks and performances at Cambridge, which from John Naughton's blog were something pretty special.

Rev - new season of the TV comedy, though the term "comedy" seems hardly appropriate when the storylines are so sad and heart-rending, as Tom Hollander's basically decent urban vicar struggles to do the right thing in a crazy and broken world.

John Craxton exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge - basically Picasso's cubism, but in mediterranean colours and with mediterranean subject: goats, mountains, seafood, beautiful worn faces.

Detective Grimoire (a review is here) - lovely cartoon-style game with great voice acting, in which you play a detective investigating a murder at a bizarre tourist attraction (Boggy's Bog). The investigation is beautifully implemented: each suspect can be questioned on a small number of standard topics, or you can present them with a clue or ask them about another person. When you find something suspicious, you have to drag-and-drop words to form a sentence identifying precisely what is suspicious and why - a neat way of incorporating the intellectual element of the detection.

The Library of Birmingham - see separate post.

The Love Punch - light comedy caper with Emma Thompson (who carries the show) and Piers Brosnan (who makes a very acceptable foil), with admirable assistance from Timothy Spall and Ceilia Imre; phrases like "guilty pleasure" and "great holiday entertainment" spring to mind. But good also to be reminded of Thompson's versatility; she doesn't just do nannies these days.

Ghost Hawk - by Susan Cooper, best know for The Dark is Rising sequence. This novel follows the inter-twined stories of a Native American boy from the Pokanoket tribes and an English boy during the mid-seventeenth century, when the conflict between the peoples did not yet seem inevitable. I put the book on my wish list, on the strength of a strong review in The Guardian, and wasn't disappointed: superb writing, clear and economical yet powerful, reminding me very much of Ursula Le Guin.

Monument Valley (a review is here) - fabulous new puzzle game on the iPad / iPhone, in which you guide a little princess around a series of buildings which incorporate M.C. Escher type tricks. The graphic and auditory aesthetic is Zen-like; this is simply a beautiful place to be. My only complaint: that there are just 10 levels.

Black Coffee - the Agatha Christie Theatre Company performing an Hercule Poirot play at Milton Keynes Theatre, with Robert Powell successfully wresting the Poirot role from the legacy of David Suchet. Proper theatre, properly done.

Choral training with Stephen Cleobury, Director of Music at King's College Cambridge - a valuable day for Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, in preparation for our trip to Granada. It never occurred to me before how much singing is like writing, especially in its presentation to an audience. Two of his tips: if your part if interesting, tell them about it; and if your part is ordinary, find a way to make it interesting.

Leap - a screening of my sister's short film (this is the trailer). A great little story, economically and engagingly told, with some neat visual themes and a powerful build-up to the slam-bang ending in which the significant of the title is revealed. Go Ros!

Cuttings: April 2014

Why Snapchat is valuable: it's all about attention – blog post by Danah Boyd, quoted in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “When someone sends you an image/video via Snapchat, they choose how long you get to view the image/video. The underlying message is simple: You’ve got 7 seconds. PAY ATTENTION. And when people do choose to open a Snap, they actually stop what they’re doing and look. In a digital world where everyone’s flicking through headshots, images, and text without processing any of it, Snapchat asks you to stand still and pay attention to the gift that someone in your network just gave you.... Snapchat is a reminder that constraints have a social purpose, that there is beauty in simplicity, and that the ephemeral is valuable. There aren’t many services out there that fundamentally question the default logic of social media and, for that, I think that we all need to pay attention to and acknowledge Snapchat’s moves in this ecosystem.”

Tumblr's Hilarious New Legal Terms Of Service Include A Ban On Pretending To Be Benedict Cumberbatch - Business Insider article, referenced in the Simplification Centre blog, where Rob Waller comments: “This is innocent-smoothie copywriting applied to the small print. I found it good fun, but could this technique be repeatable by others? Only if it suits their users and brand. Like those smoothies, too much can make you queasy after a while.” Some extracts from the Terms of Service:

• "Confusion or impersonation. Don't do things that would cause confusion between you or your blog and a person or company, like registering a deliberately confusing URL. Don't impersonate anyone. While you're free to ridicule, parody, or marvel at the alien beauty of Benedict Cumberbatch, you can't pretend to actually be Benedict Cumberbatch."

• "Gore, Mutilation, Bestiality, or Necrophilia. Don't post gore just to be shocking. Don't showcase the mutilation of torture of human beings, animals, or their remains. Dick." 

• "Misattribution or Non-Attribution. Make sure you always give proper attribution and include full links back to original sources. When you find something awesome on Tumblr, reblog it instead of reposting it. It's less work and more fun, anyway. When reblogging something, DO NOT inject a link back to your blog just to steal attention from the original post."

The invention of radio talks at the BBC, in “What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?” - Guardian articles by Charlotte Higgins.

• "[Hilda Matheson, first director of talks], like her colleagues, was making up broadcasting as she went along. What was a “programme”? The models for BBC broadcasts were the public lecture, the political speech, the theatre and the variety hall. One of Matheson’s many achievements was to realise that the microphone demanded an entirely different manner from the podium. “It was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even to read it essays or leading articles,” she wrote. “The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly.” She rehearsed, coaxed and harried speakers until they found a mode of speech that worked."

• Vita Sackville-West, whom Matheson invited to give talks, gave the following account: “You are taken into a studio, which is a large and luxuriously appointed room, and there is a desk, heavily padded, and over it hangs a little white box, suspended from two wires from the ceiling. There are lots of menacing notices about ‘DON’T COUGH – you will deafen millions of people’, ‘DON’T RUSTLE YOUR PAPERS’, and ‘Don’t turn to the announcer and say was that all right? when you have finished’ … one has never talked to so few people, or so many; it’s very queer. And then you cease, and there is an awful grim silence as though you had been a complete failure … and then you hear the announcer saying ‘London calling. Weather and News bulletin’, and you creep away.”

The Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty – Guardian review by Michael Moorcock of book by Greg Grandin. “In a superbly argued and richly detailed account of the interdependencies of slavery and revolution throughout the Americas, as well as the religious traditions of Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam (many of the west Africans were educated Muslims), Grandin brings to vivid life the realities of the period, pointing out that, of the estimated 12,500,000 Africans carried to the Americas between 1514 and 1866, at least half were boarded after 4 July 1776…. Numbers increased after 1800 as the US economy became increasingly reliant on slavery…. One person's freedom was all but impossible without another's servitude.”

Why all babies love peekaboo - from Mindhacks blog. "An early theory of why babies enjoy peekaboo is that they are surprised when things come back after being out of sight. This may not sound like a good basis for laughs to you or I, with our adult brains, but to appreciate the joke you have to realise that for a baby, nothing is given. They are born into a buzzing confusion, and gradually have to learn to make sense of what is happening around them. You know that when you hear my voice, I’m usually not far behind, or that when a ball rolls behind a sofa it still exists, but think for a moment how you came by this certainty....  As the baby gets older their carer lets the game adapt to the babies’ new abilities, allowing both adult and infant to enjoy a similar game but done in different ways. The earliest version of peekaboo is simple looming, where the carer announces they are coming with their voice before bringing their face into close focus for the baby. As the baby gets older they can enjoy the adult hiding and reappearing, but after a year or so they can graduate to take control by hiding and reappearing themselves. In this way peekaboo can keep giving, allowing a perfect balance of what a developing baby knows about the world, what they are able to control and what they are still surprised by. Thankfully we adults enjoy their laughter so much that the repetition does nothing to stop us enjoying endless rounds of the game ourselves."

What are libraries for?

At some time or another over the last decade or so, probably every librarian in the world has asked themselves what the purpose of libraries is, in an internet-equipped world where all the information and literature of the world is available (at least in our imagination) with speed, ease and convenience at our own desk or in our own palm.

A photograph of a medieval library, in a recent article in the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine (Issue 71, pp 28-33), reminded me of how much things have changed. When that library was built, books were so scarce that there was no need for bookshelves: each book had its own reading desk, to which it was chained. There was no question of borrowing books; to read a particular book, you had to travel to a particular library and sit down at a particular desk. There was no presumption that a library's purpose was to make books available; in fact, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose only required a slight imaginative twist to conceive of a monastic library actually designed to prevent would-be readers from accessing the books therein.

The huge libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century were designed in a period in which it seemed an achievable ambition to gather all human knowledge, or a pretty good approximation to it, within the compass of four walls and a very large number of bookshelves. My old university's library was one of the handful in the country designated as "copyright libraries" (the British Library, formerly the British Museum, being the most famous) legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book and periodical published in the UK - a right that even before the advent of the internet was becoming increasingly difficult to exercise.

Now public libraries are re-branding themselves as information resource centres, and librarians spend as much or more time with digital materials as with printed books. At the Open University, where I currently work, and where only a tiny fraction of its students are able to visit the Library in person, the shift to online resources is a natural complement to our distance learning - though it does make the Library building a curiously empty space, with the librarians hidden behind Staff Only doors and the reading desks inhabited by a handful of African research students in need of somewhere to work.

So it was a joy to visit the new Library of Birmingham: a building conceived and designed not just to replace the old Birmingham City Library but to create a new role for itself. No public library is going to compete with the digital resources of the internet, but it can do something which the online environment can't: it can provide a physical space which is a nice place to be. And that the Library of Birmingham has done beautifully. Visiting it on a Sunday afternoon, with my wife and an old friend now a Librarian at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, we were struck by the number of families enjoying the building: browsing, exploring, having a good time.

From the outside, the building looks like a gold and silver jewellery box, but inside nothing is box-like: the internal walls all seem to be curved, running around like a snail's shell. The only obvious straight lines are the escalators, slicing across the central atrium at jaunty angles. Riding them up to the top of the building is like going on a non-scary theme park ride: vaut le voyage just for the pan-optical views alone. The books are arranged so as to be meaningful and convenient to users, rather than librarians and catalogues: there are books for browsing, the one (mainly fiction) most likely to be borrowed; there are books for finding things out (mainly non-fiction), arranged in radial shelves; and there are books purely for reference (such as the Statutes of England), which most users will never consult but look great on the shelves in their identical bindings and are located where they can best be decorative, as a sort of literary wallpaper.

At the top of the building is an observation deck, with large red sofas in which to relax and look out across the cityscape. There's also the Shakespeare memorial room: an elegant Elizabethan-style wood-panelled room, transported from the original library where it was built in 1882. A stone panel from 1887 cryptically connects the Library to its nineteenth century past and remoter medieval history. There's even a (well-signposted) secret garden. On the ground floor is a cafe, where we rounded out our happy afternoon with tea and cakes.

One of the tests of a library is what unexpected discoveries you make there. My unexpected and unlooked-for discovery, from a facing-out display in the non-fiction section, was a book called Writing for New Media - modern in this context meaning 1998,but still deeply relevant and inspirational in several intriguing chapters on the grammar of interactivity. (I've since ordered the book and will no doubt be posting about it soon.) May all the users of this great new library enjoy, as we did, happy afternoons and serendipitous discoveries.